became reconciled to his former wife, and died, in 1712, at the
age of sixty-one. He was the Orlando of the _Tatler_.

Beau Edgeworth lives only in the record of Steele, in the 246th number
of the _Tatler_, as a "very handsome youth who frequented the
coffeehouses about Charing-Cross, and wore a very pretty ribbon with a
cross of jewels on his breast." Beau Nash completes the list of the
ancient heroes, dying in 1761, at the age of eighty-eight--a man of
singular success in his frivolous style; made for a master of the
ceremonies, the model of all sovereigns of water-drinking places; absurd
and ingenious, silly and shrewd, avaricious and extravagant. He
_created_ Bath; he taught decency to "bucks," civility to card-players,
care to prodigals, and caution to Irishmen! Bath has never seen his like
again. In English high life, birth is every thing or nothing. Men of the
lowest extraction generally start up, and range the streets arm-in-arm
with the highest. Middle life alone is prohibited to make its approach;
the line of demarcation there is like the gulf of Curtius, not to be
filled up, and is growing wider and wider every day. The line of George
Brummell is like that of the Gothic kings--without a pedigree; like that
of the Indian rajahs--is lost in the clouds of antiquity; and like that
of Romulus--puzzles the sagacious with rumours of original irregularity
of descent. But the most probable existing conjecture is, that his
grandfather was a confectioner in Bury Street, St James's. We care not a
straw about the matter, though the biographer is evidently uneasy on the
subject, doubts the trade, and seems to think that he has thrown a shade
of suspicion, a sort of exculpatory veil over this fatal rumour, by
proving that this grandfather and his wife were both buried, as is shown
by a stone, still to be seen by the curious, in St James's church-yard.
We were not before aware that Christian burial was forbidden to
confectioners. The biographer further adds the convincing evidence of
gentility, that this grandfather was buried within a few feet of the
well-known ribald, Tom Durfey. Scepticism must now hang down its head,
and fly the field.

We come to a less misty and remote period. In the house of this
ancestor, who (_proh dedecus!_) let lodgings, lived Charles Jenkinson,
then holding some nondescript office under government. We still want a
history of that singularly dexterous, shy, silent, and successful man;
who, like